The Antidote summary

Most of us would like everything in life to be just right. But perhaps our urge to have everything perfect is a big part of what’s wrong.

The ironic process theory states that when you try to suppress certain thoughts or behaviors, they (ironically) end up becoming more prevalent. This has been demonstrated in the so-called white bear challenge: if you’re told to not think about a white bear, you can’t help but think about a white bear.

Ever notice how self-help books only tell stories with happy endings? Stories about people who took risks and made millions or who worked hard and achieved the impossible? Somehow we never read autobiographies by people who boldly went out and pursued their dreams – and then flat-out failed.

This is because despite what self-help gurus and proponents say, we all fail at some stage in our lives.

Today, most of us try to avoid thinking about the things in life that bring about negative emotions – like death. But actually, we have no control over our emotions.

According to Brené Brown, a scholar in the field of vulnerability, we cannot “selectively numb” emotions, i.e., decide to put negative emotions, like vulnerability, grief, shame, fear and disappointment, in a box and throw it out the window.

Life is inherently uncertain. Nobody can say whether they’ll win the lottery or get run over by a car tomorrow: the threat of negative things happening is a part of life.

But our recognition of uncertainty doesn’t seem to prevent us from obsessively avoiding it. We spend far too much of our lives seeking “closure” of past events and want too many clear-cut answers and facts, even when there are none to be had.

Everybody has fears. And one way of dealing with them is to make them real.

According to Albert Ellis, a psychologist and proponent of Stoicism, by actually experiencing the unpleasantness of our fears, we see how much we’ve exaggerated them. For example, Ellis had many clients who expressed their fear of public humiliation – and his suggestion to them was that they deliberately embarrass themselves in public.

Despite what many people believe, the desire for happiness is not universal. We’ve already seen that many cultures have viewed negativity as a positive thing at different points in history.

The Stoics were one of the most famous groups to embrace negativity in order to achieve happiness. They did this by imagining the worst-case scenarios so that when something terrible happened to them, it would (almost) always be less severe than their expectations.

Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius once said, “Things do not touch the soul […] our perturbations come only from the opinion which is within.”

The Stoics sought to face their circumstances with tranquility and a calm indifference, not with strong emotions. One way to do this, they argued, was by examining negative experiences and emotions.

No matter how many times we’ve been told to live in the moment, it’s in our nature to get attached to things, and so we suffer when things change.

When we get attached to any given situation, person or thing, we set ourselves up to get hurt, because nothing is permanent. For example, if we get too attached to good looks in our youth – rather than enjoying them while they last – we’ll suffer more when they fade. If we latch on to a luxurious lifestyle, we could end up in an unhappy and fearful struggle to keep it up for the rest of our lives. If we attach too strongly to life, death will seem all the more frightening.